I am not Holden

So the moon is almost full, and I have a relatively minor birthday coming up in the rear-view mirror, and I'm feeling a nostalgic wave of emotion with the reappearance of a lost-lost friend through the fiendish magic of Facebook, and in the midst of the usual everyday ups and downs comes news of the death of a long-disappeared but still resonant literary hero. So I join just about everyone I know in celebrating the work and mourning the passing of J.D. Salinger.

I cannot think of a more poignant coming-of-age story than Catcher in the Rye, yet there is nothing I can say about it that hasn't already been said - and said badly - in a thousand freshman English papers. For starters, I'm betting Salinger would hate that word poignant, which I added in the second draft, and I'm using it anyway.

A literary critic on NPR praised Salinger for writing "with all his stars out," whatever that means. Actually I think I know what it means, but I can't tell you, and if you don't get it, well, never mind. It's a metaphor, damn it, a linguistic bridge from an obvious, so-called literal, statement to a truth beyond the literal, and either it speaks to you or it doesn't. It's something Salinger accomplished with remarkable, even breathtaking honesty. That's why Holden, that slightly snotty, sophisticated preppy antihero, hit home so well with so many less self-aware midwestern kids like me and every single one of my friends.

When I arrived in the rec center parking lot, I wanted to keep listening but I had to turn off the car radio because it was time for class to begin. One by one the students filtered in, and the circle in the middle of the room gradually expanded from three to four to eight, and the shakuhachi music in the background only made it more conducive to surrender to the lapping of the internal wave machine and to dedicate this evening's practice to an old man who valued privacy yet had contact with millions of fortunate readers.

There isn't much people can do for each other on a cold Thursday night in January in Ohio, but we can stand in a circle and try to keep each other from walking off a cliff. I had some time after class, so I went to the library just to see if there were any Salinger titles still on the shelves, and to my surprise found two copies of Franny and Zooey, so I checked one out, got a cup of coffee, read a few pages, and immediately fell back in love with the voice that so many young readers cut their reading teeth on. I wish I could write dialog like that.

What can you do? You go to your next meeting, where a few of the people in the circle are on the same page and some are not. You can listen respectfully and go home with the candle wax drying on your sleeve and answer the phone when it vibrates in your pocket. It's my parents on the phone, wishing me a happy birthday and disclosing, because I asked, the latest wrinkle in their ongoing struggle with the inevitable challenges of aging. Which I can relate to, but in comparison I have no idea, so there isn't much you can do but listen and bear witness.

Zelda came over for dinner the next night like a breath of fresh air on a cold night. She has read some, if not all, of Salinger's fiction, and she knows the characters well enough to correct my pronunciation of their names. So there is that. She and her brother are not Phoebe and Holden, but they have made their acquaintance and possibly gotten together for cocktails on occasion.